FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts.

Busybox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities used in embedded systems and Multimedia was only making the executable version of the firmware that it created using Busybox available, not the source code. Monsoon joined in the SFLC announcement and had its CEO Graham Radstone s

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks

I've actually seen a few reports of people having trouble with the upgrade - their computer hangs at the bootup screen for hours on end. Since I didn't 'upgrade' (like a good boy, I reformatted and started over) I didn't experience the hour-long hangs, however, I did experience some de

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companie

Sybase has announced new Microsoft .NET Framework-based enhancements to PowerBuilder 11 and DataWindow.NET 2.5. New features for PowerBuilder include Windows Vista support, .NET Framework incremental compile capabilities, and database driver enhancements. DataWindow .NET 2.5 has been e

Consistent with its position that the 2002 consent decree imposed on Microsoft did what it was supposed to - and that the European Commission is misguided - the Justice Department says it has no intension of seeking to extend the decree's provisions past their November 12 expiration da

Eleventh-hour bugs have held up the production of One Laptop Per Child's XO machine and the production hiccup is going to throw a monkey wrench into the non-profit's 'Give 1 Get 1' fundraiser, according to Reuters. Production has been pushed from October until November 12, the day OLP

For all the badmouthing it gets, Microsoft keeps trudging gloriously on - this time far enough out to tickle its stock out of its usual quagmire and score a multi-year high of $35.72 after hours, up 11.6%. The company posted revenues of $13.76 billion for the September quarter, a 27%

Microsoft, which has decided not to appeal the Court of First Instance's September 17 ruling in favor of the European Commission and its 2004 antitrust order against the company, has also agreed to bend its terms to the open source business model and slash the price of its server commu

In the past year, Apple stock has been +115%, vs Microsoft +7%. Over the last five years, Apple stock has been +2270%, vs Microsoft +21%. And in the last ten years, Apple stock has been +4314%, vs Microsoft +89%. Those extraordinary statistics emerged during the week as the blogger com

The word on the rumor mill is that Mac OS X Leopard will be shipping on October 26th. While this is good news for some people, this is freaking great news for me. Why? Because after the 26th I will finally be able to do blog posts that contain information on Leopard, I'll be able to po

Enterprises frequently have to deal with part of their infrastructure that doesn't have the privilege of uninterrupted connectivity. Such system environments designed using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) need a way to manage uncertain connectivity. SOA as an architectural paradigm

Just this morning I saw a blog post containing some details about Microsoft's new and upcoming MVC framework for ASP.NET. I'm actually a little shocked - the sheer amount of 'stuff' that is being piled into the Visual Studio 2008 release is positively staggering, though technically thi

Microsoft released a beta XP SP3 to testers on Sunday and, besides a veritable multitude of 1,073 fixes and patches, according to a blog by NeoSmart Technologies, it apparently contains more backported - presumably life-extending - Vista security features than it was supposed to - stuf

Ballmer then went on to say: 'There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says 'Pay us,' I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I'll call an intellectual prop

SharpDevelop has released version 2.2. Version 2.2 is mostly a bug fix release, but also adds support for newer versions of Boo (0.7.8), NUnit(2.4.1) and Wix (2.0.5325), Cecil (0.5), additional templates have been added, and SharpDevelop Reports 2.2 are included while support for the o

'Our Windows Live Hotmail, in and of itself, doesn't generate much ad revenue,' explained Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during a Microsoft Startup Accelerator Programme speech this week. 'So we've had to put, essentially, a whole portal around it because the traffic around it is very val

Over the last few months I've written a series of blog posts that covered some of the new language features that are coming with the Visual Studio and .NET Framework Orcas release. Developers can use LINQ with any data source. They can express efficient query behavior in their programm

Microsoft could do more multibillion-dollars deals like its $6.1 billion acquisition of online ad house aQuantive, CEO Steve Ballmer said at a press conference in Zurich. Reuters quotes him as saying, 'We do not rule out any more deals like this. But this something we are not doing eve

Earth Class Mail, the start-up with the vision of traditional posts opening the mail and delivering it electronically, announced a relationship with Microsoft from Post Expo 2007 in Barcelona this week. Earth Class has moved its Linux-based platform to .NET, as it hinted it would, repo

A flaw that allows hackers to use rigged PDF files to take control of Window XP computers with Internet Explorer 7 installed, remains unpatched. The exploit has been known since April at least, yet neither Microsoft nor Adobe have yet patched it. To protect Windows XP systems with Inte

The ability that I will have to debug code within Visual Studio 2008 will be unprecedented. Why? Because now instead of having to use third party tools to dissasemble Microsoft libraries so that I can get a deep stack trace and figure out exactly where something blew up so I can find o

Having spent so much of my life working with real, live, production-running ASP.NET applications (which includes real, live, production-sized headaches!) I am definitely curious about this new MVC framework. Admittedly I'm a little jaded because I figure any enterprise-class web applic

Microsoft recently released the Interop Forms Toolkit 2.0 in order to allow 'developers to incorporate VB.NET Forms and Controls into their VB6 applications' (www.mi crosoft.com/downloads/det ails.aspx?FamilyID=934de3 c5-dc85-4065-9327-96801e5 7b81d&DisplayLang=en).

Infragistics has released Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET 2007 Volume 3, which includes toolsets for both ASP.NET and Windows Forms, giving developers the tools to create compelling user experiences in line-of-business applications. NetAdvantage for .NET 2007 Volume 3 reduces develo

In a move widely interpreted as a response to Google, Microsoft inched Office a tad closer to the web Sunday when it started accepting applications to play with some webby beta functionality it intends to introduce later this year called Office Live Workspace. When the widgetry comes o

Microsoft says it's going to release the source code for the .NET Framework libraries with the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 release later this year.nThe code will be released under the read-only Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) generally used only for debugging. Not exactly open

Showing its strong commitment to the Sybase community, the International Sybase User Group has announced that it will be taking to the road with a series of PowerBuilder-focused events under the banner 'Leveraging PowerBuilder in the .NET World.' These hands-on technical seminars will

SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards program, widely considered to be the most prestigious award program in the software industry, is a community-driven process in which the products participating in the program are nominated by the industry's vendors, customers, and users, as well as by t

I think we'd all be able to stomach the lack of SDK if Apple gave us the impression that they were working on it. Instead of throwing the AJAX pacifier at us and saying 'Sweet.', they could have simply said that they were working on a real SDK and that AJAX would be a good temporary fi

Playing catch-up Microsoft says it's going to undercut salesforce.com later this quarter when it trots out Dynamics Live CRM, its first in-house hosted customer relationship management software. Microsoft's already got third parties hosting Dynamics CRM, which explains the rationale fo

I feel as if there is a calm on the .NET waters at the moment and it's a rare and somewhat uneasy sensation. Most of the developers I know are playing with Blend and Silverlight and all the cool WPF stuff, even if their specialty is back-end database work. We all know there is another

This article talks about the ease with which DataWindows can be designed and consumed in a Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 environment. The DataWindow .NET version 2.5 has the infrastructure to support this concept. With the earlier versions of the DataWindow .NET, such as 1.0, 1.5 and 2.

Software development tools-maker Iron Speed Inc. has released Iron Speed Designer Version 5.0, the latest version of its application generator. Iron Speed Designer generates interactive data entry and reporting Web applications for .NET. New features such as PDF report generation, data

Bluespring Software has released BPM Suite - SharePoint Edition, designed for businesses looking to deploy SharePoint in an environment with complex process or workflow needs. BPM Suite - SharePoint Edition comes pre-packaged with the right amount of SharePoint, SQL Server and Office 2

As you know, Silverlight is a new RIA enabling technology from Microsoft. Slightly less publicized but no less impactful is another technology from Microsoft - Astoria. Astoria is a tool that combines the power of the ADO.NET Entity Framework with the new enhanced power of RESTful POX

Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes got ticked off over the criticism that the US Justice Department leveled at the antitrust verdict handed down Monday against Microsoft by Europe's second most powerful court, the Court of First Instance (CFI). In a written statement Assistant Attor

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let